Report Seeks Reprimand For 1 On Vincennes

August 14, 1988|By Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Top military officials reviewing the downing of an Iranian passenger jet by the USS Vincennes have recommended disciplinary action against the ship's operations officer only, Pentagon officials said Saturday.

A Navy board considered and rejected recommending action against officers as high as Rear Adm. Anthony Less, commander of the Persian Gulf naval task force of which the Vincennes was part.

In a 1,000-page report that will be given to Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci this week, military officials said Saturday, the board places most of the blame on the operations officer for his role in misinterpreting information that resulted in the cruiser mistakenly shooting down the jetliner on July 3, killing all 290 people aboard.

A report now being reviewed by Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommends a letter of reprimand to the operations officer, which would not become part of his official personnel file, officials said. The name of the officer has not been disclosed.

The report was compiled by an investigative team headed by Rear Adm. William Fogarty and given to Marine Gen. George Crist, head of the Central Command, which controls the Persian Gulf region, for review. It was then forwarded to Crowe, who has been reading it this weekend and could recommend lesser or greater disciplinary measures, officials said.

By the time an unclassified version of the report is made public, it may have been changed during this complicated review process, Pentagon officials said. They added that there is little inclination among high officials to take a hard line against anybody from Less, who was in the gulf on his flagship, the USS Coronado, at the time of the airplane downing, to the sailors who misinterpreted data displayed on their consoles on the high-tech cruiser.

The general conclusion of the report is that a series of human errors led to the misidentification of the Iranian jetliner and that there was no significant malfunction in the performance of the Vincennes' Aegis radar tracking and identification systems, according to officials.

Pentagon sources said Fogarty and members of his investigatory team felt undercut by Crowe's apparent exoneration of Capt. Will Rogers, the Vincennes skipper, immediately after the incident. At a news conference in Washington, Crowe said the Vincennes skipper had ''acted with good judgment.''

The Fogarty report, according to informed officials, documents a number of errors, many of them human rather than mechanical.

A sailor in charge of executing the firing sequence for the missiles fumbled several times, military officials said in giving one example, resulting in a delay. If he had fumbled the sequence one more time, they added, the airliner probably would have become visible to the Vincennes crew and the mistake possibly could have been averted.

Still to be explained is how the high-tech equipment on the Vincennes could have been misinterpreted. The Navy investigators reportedly discovered that radar on two of the ships that were near the Vincennes, the USS Elmer Montgomery and USS John H. Sides, had detected the Iranian jet as ascending, not diving down in a threatening mode as the Vincennes had reported.